> "The Checklist Manifesto" chose to overlook the studies about how transient the benefit of checklists is.
It's been almost a year now since I read this but I'm fairly certain Atul touched on this, either in this book or in his book "Better", that after those implementing the changes left, the departments often fell back into old habits.
This isn't just with checklists, but a typical behavior of organizations (at any scale). Organizations are systems, systems tend to fall into a steady state of performance, quality, etc. after some period of time. If you draw the people's attention to something (checklists, quotas, threats, praise, etc.) you can see a temporary boost in performance, but unless the culture changes the performance tends to return to that same steady state (maybe slightly enhanced or worse).
In order for the benefit to stick, you need to actually change the system. Otherwise, complacency or other things will return when the pressure and other early benefits wear off.
In other words it isn't having a checklist, it is actually checking that people follow the checklist. Note that follow the checklist is different from checking all items on the checklist which is an obvious work around to the requirement that you follow a checklist.
It's been almost a year now since I read this but I'm fairly certain Atul touched on this, either in this book or in his book "Better", that after those implementing the changes left, the departments often fell back into old habits.
Could this be the case?